Wentworth, despite the best attempts of many different “stakeholders” retains a certain magic for British golf fans.
The opulence of the Surrey Estate, those thatched roof mansions tucked between huge trees sometimes almost invisible until you’re at their wrought iron gates, is literally alien – like stepping into another world – for annual visitors like me for the BMW PGA Championship.
Even though the West Course has been irrevocably scarred by a re-design to a former owner’s ignorance, the short second hole and that final stretch is surely etched on the memory of anyone halfway interested in golf from years of TV pictures of PGAs and World Matchplays. Outside of the Old Course, or maybe the Turnberry lighthouse, is there any more familiar view in European golf?
That awful redesign – I still can’t quite forgive one of my favourite players, Ernie Els, for what happened to the 18th – ruined the West Course for me, although I am excited to see the re-do completed this winter with Ernie, Paul McGinley and Thomas Bjorn collaborating on the project.
The trio have apparently tried to go back to what original designer Harry Colt intended (how they know this I have no idea, but given McGinley’s reputation for research and detail there’s a fair chance it didn’t come from a seance). Sadly they haven’t changed the 18th, but when someone draws a scalpel across a masterpiece sometimes it simply can’t be repaired.
A lot of the work has been for practical purposes. Not before time, even if the bill is eye-popping, Wentworth’s troublesome greens have been sorted with the installation of the sub-air control system pioneered at Augusta and so successful at Gleneagles’ PGA Centenary Course for the Ryder Cup.
Those greens – effectively two strains of grass growing at different rates made them a nightmare – were the chief reason that leading players simply stopped coming to Wentworth. Rory McIlroy is sadly out nursing his troublesome rib injury, but it was the greens that made him a definite Wentworth sceptic for years, a stance shared by such luminaries as Henrik Stenson, Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia and Padraig Harrington.
The re-do of the course and the greens has been financed by Wentworth’s newest owners, a Chinese congolmerate, partly it seems as a reaction to the volley of (entirely deserved) negative publicity they endured for attempting to freeze out existing members and make the club ultra-exclusive – given that it’s already fairly exclusive this was not exactly a revolt but it was vociferous enough to make the owners think again.
That revolt had the Wentworth residents stirring from their leafy reverie and starting to hint at extra demands to the Tour for the week of disruption for the PGA (actually, you can walk around parts of the estate when the tournament is in full swing and be utterly unaware there are 30,000 people on the premises). A fee five times what the Tour pays now was mentioned.
All this fuelled rumours that the Tour wanted out, maybe to some other more accommodating venue within the Surrey/Berkshire stockbroker belt, and that they might also move their long-time offices on the estate elsewhere.
Apparently that particular idea is still live (and has some wings after last week’s announcement that the PGA Tour is to open a London office) but in terms of the championship Keith Pelley and the Tour seem to have entrenched their flagship at Wentworth for the forseeable future, given the heavy involvement in the West Course alterations and the fact that this is the first of Pelley’s much trumpeted “Rolex Series” of $7 million events that form the core of his plans to inject more dynamism and interest in the Tour.
All of the above – and I’ll pause for you to take it all in – brings my to my point, that this is the most important BMW PGA ever, and arguably the most important event the European Tour has staged in the modern era.
Simply put, the Tour needs the Rolex Series to be a roaring success if it’s to be anything more than a bi-annual points race for the Ryder Cup.
Have the players responded? McIlroy was playing until his rib intervened, but Garcia is not there, which is an arguably even more signficant blow.
Garcia is at the Dean & Deluca event in Texas (the old Colonial) as is Jon Rahm, Graeme McDowell and Paul Casey. All of them have differing reasons for being in Texas rather than Surrey but it’s interesting to note that the prizefund for the Colonial – one of their longer running regulars but still a pretty run of the mill mid-season tournament – is only a few hundred thousand dollars short of that being played for over here.
The BMW PGA this year needed the wow factor. In recent years it’s been a bit mundane for what should be the all-singing, all-dancing week of the Tour.
It’s only fair to suspend complete judgement until we turn off the A30, go under the arch and see all the bells and whistles the Tour have added on.
One fervently hopes it goes with a bang and not a whimper.